Everything I Need to Know, I Learned in Theater On Technology and Storytelling

My name is Joshua Turton, and I am a Theater Artist.

From 1989 to 2003, I lived and breathed theater as an actor, singer, stagehand, painter, designer, props artisan, and carpenter. I earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Theater Arts with an emphasis on Technology and Design, worked with everything from middle schools to Tony Award-winning regional theaters, met celebrities, built puppets, nearly died, made cherished friends, repaired an animatronic dress, and frequently went several weeks at a time without seeing the sun. It was a fascinating, fulfilling, educational time in my life, and, like all good things, eventually came to an end.

In 2003, I graduated with my MFA in Computer Arts/New Media and became a web developer. I’ve been in this industry ever since—more than 20 years now!

But I’ve found my job has never changed.

I’m a storyteller. More to the point, I’m a collaborative storyteller, a creator who works with other creators to make things one person working alone couldn’t accomplish.

Today, I’d like to suggest something to you.

We are all storytellers.

It is written into our DNA. We humans are wired to tell stories to each other. Cognitive science tells us that language, stories, and culture evolved simultaneously, and are interdependent.¹ The evolutionary advantage communication gave to early hominids drove natural selection toward bigger, more complex brains; those brains in turn allowed us to tell more and better stories.

In other words, stories both have been a vital part of the human experience since humans began having experiences. They speak to us in a way that nothing else can.

When Jesus wanted to get an idea across to his followers, he told stories. We call these the parables, and Matthew, Mark and Luke chronicle around 40 of them (depends on how you count).  Even if you’ve never read the Bible, you’ve probably heard of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. His stories form the foundation of moral principle for a huge number of people in the world.

Shakespeare told stories: stories of passion, of greed, of violence and love, of power and loss. Hundreds of years later, we still perform, reinvent, and adapt these tales - on stage and in film. Though we have no recordings of his original productions, modern takes on Shakespeare’s work, such as Sir Ian McKellen in Richard III (1995), or Leo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet (1996), among many others, show just how potent his tales remain, even when reimagined for different times.

Our new storytellers are just as powerful. Am I comparing Pixar to Jesus and Shakespeare?! Yes I am. Because if you can watch the end of Toy Story 3 and feel nothing, I submit you might be a robot. Please report to your friendly neighborhood Blade Runner for Voight-Kompff testing.

Stories are the way we connect to one another, over time and distance. But that connection is getting harder.

The Evolving Noise Problem

Stories used to be told face to face, around a campfire, in a small group setting. Some scientists think that the discovery of fire itself, and the extra socialization time that it added to the human experience, was a driving force behind the development of language and storytelling. They note that this practice has been going on for possibly as long as 400,000 years².

This practice didn’t vary much until between the 10th and 6th centuries BCE, with the development of what we now call theater. The primary difference between campfire stories and theater is the audience size, and the change in interpersonal interaction. It’s easy to interact with 17 people sitting around a campfire. It’s more difficult when the audience numbers 300 or 1,000 – or even 13,000, as the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus in Greece holds³!

And then came…

The printing press. Movable type and woodblock printing had been around for a long time, in various places, but in the Western world, Johannes Gutenberg’s mid-15th century work on the printing press, metal alloys for movable type, and oil-based printing ink was the catalyst to the rapid development of modern printing practices.

Suddenly, it became possible to spread a story to people across distance and time, but with no interpersonal connection at all with the consumer. And, with the mass production of books, pamphlets, and newspapers, there was an increase in the amount of stories available to grab people’s attention.

And then came…

Radio. In the late 19th century, the air began to fill with stories, broadcast across land and sea.

This was really the first major advance in storytelling technology in several centuries, which reintroduced the personal voice, but continued the trend of wider dissemination and disconnection. More stories than ever were available. And of course, the more stories that are available, the harder it is for any given story to reach the intended audience.

And then came…

Moving pictures, and eventually television. And, later, the internet. Each of these leaps has increased the amount of stories available for humans to consume, yet decreased the direct personal connection. It is easier than ever to send out a story into the world, but harder for that story to find an audience. On YouTube, for example, hundreds of hours of video are uploaded every minute, but it’s reported that about 5% of the billions of videos have zero views and about 38% have five or fewer⁴.

And that trend has accelerated, with each new development taking less and less time and creating more and more noise.

So that leads to a question: In a world full of stories, full of chatter, how does one person or organization get their story to the right eyes and ears? There’s lots of answers: SEO, marketing, advertisements, social sharing. But ultimately, the most important factor is quality.

Search engine giant Google notes that content quality is the single most important factor in their search ranking process⁵. They call it EEAT - Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

So how do we do that?

Quality Guarantee

Spoiler alert: There is no quality guarantee. Not even the most accomplished writers and artists are 100% successful with everything they do. But I believe that the secret sauce can be found in a question I was trained to ask long ago, as a young theater design student:

What do you want the audience to walk away with?

This question was asked by our design professors at the beginning of every critique of every design project we presented. We were challenged - required - to talk about every aspect of our designs, every decision we made, in the light of this question. It was the foundation of our work. And they took our answers seriously.

I believe that this question is just as important in our work today on the internet as it was for me all those years ago in theater.

As digital collaborative storytellers, our best work happens when we are partners to our clients, not just software vendors.

Our process at Capellic is designed to help us understand the breadth of our client’s vision and goals, not in terms of buzzwords and fancy widgets, but in terms of meaning. After all, no one knows our clients’ stories better than themselves, so our role is to build the stage on which they can tell them.

What it boils down to is that all of our work as a collaborative web development team serves the same story, defined by that single question.

Because, ultimately, everything else—the software and the color palettes and the contracts and the Jira tickets—is a tool for storytelling. Technology itself is a tool.

Story is the key to reaching your audience.

Let us help you tell your story.

1. Boyd B. (2018). The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction. Wiley Interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science, 9(1), e1444. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1444 ↑
2. Dunbar R, Gowlett J. Fireside chat: the impact of fire on hominin socioecology In: Dunbar R, Gamble C, Gowlett J, eds. Lucy to Language: The Benchmark Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2014, 277–296. ↑
3. Wikipedia. (2021, April 2). Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Theatre_of_Epidaurus‌ ↑
4. Schwab, P.-N. (2024, January 12). Research reveals YouTube’s most secret stats. Market Research Consulting. https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/research-youtube-stats/ ↑
5. Google. (2025, February 4). Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content | Google Search Central | Documentation. Google Developers. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content ↑